A Smart Contract Based Blockchain Approach Integrated with Elliptic Curve Cryptography for Secure Email Application

In today’s interconnected digital era, email stands as a primary platform for communication across various fields, such as business, academia, and personal interactions. Since it operates on shared mediums, email is inherently susceptible to interception and misuse of sensitive information. To cover this issue, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) ensures the confidentiality of email contents. However, while PGP effectively encrypts the body of messages, a significant vulnerability emerges during key sharing. Blockchain technology comes with its immutability aspect. Once data is embedded into the blockchain, modifying it becomes exceedingly challenging. This makes it a potential safeguard against the vulnerabilities in PGP’s key sharing mechanism. Additionally, smart contracts remove the requirement of a Man-in-the-Middle for sharing key, which enhances the sharing key’s security and builds trust among users. In this paper, we integrate the strengths of blockchain into the PGP encryption process, specifically targeting the key sharing vulnerability. Also, we adopt Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to ensure the confidentiality of the PGP’s key. First, generate the PGP’s key. Then, encrypt it using ECC. After that, deploy a smart contract and continue with the encrypted PGP’s key transactions in blockchain networks. Through this integration, we aim to enhance the security, ensuring both confidentiality and integrity of the PGP’s key. We demonstrated that the proposed system is workable by experimental observation.